❧
My life has changed rather drastically in the last week. Drastic may be a little strong for the decisions I've made, but they are big changes for me in the sense they make me more alone with myself and my weird opinions, and point to an even greater need for me to amuse myself without much external help. No blame.
The most "drastic" change I made in the past few weeks was to cancel my account with the latest company to buy out the previous company who served as my ISP and home phone commercial benefactor. As of March 15th I don't have a DSL account or a home phone account. The blinking LED lights of the modem went off just before dawn on the 16th, and our tawdry little affair was over.
I probably should have kept the home phone, but I decided to make a clean break. The DSL is not a problem because I'm connected through my brother's commercial account with a much faster download speed. I plan to get a smartphone of some sort or at least a regular cell phone due to the mobility it would give me.
The Assurance Company that "gave" me a free cell phone is a ripoff. I've never been able to make or receive a single telephone call on it, so I took out the battery to wait for them to decide to cancel my account. I'm disappointed that it didn't work, but "life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone."
The fact is that I didn't make a single long distance call on my old touch tone phone for the last three years, and no more than five long distance calls in the ten years before that. I'm not exactly the "great communicator." I had a job a long time ago in which I was on the telephone for a living for about three years, and it burned me out on communicating over that media.
When the internet and e-mail came along I subscribed to a series of e-mail discussion groups, and participated vigorously because it gave me a chance to write and become more skilled at saying what I see in that manner. That's the other "drastic" change I made yesterday, when I unsubscribed again from the one group I've been a vigorous, participating member of for the last four or five years.
The first time I subscribed to this group, and subsequently unsubbed from it after nearly four years, one of the moderators wrote to me and asked me to re-subscribe because the group activity appeared to be losing it's momentum, so I did, but I probably shouldn't have. Nobody could keep it going because e-mail as a means of communicating seems to be taking a nose-dive.
So, I don't get any e-mail anymore to inspire me to write "to" a specific person, but only to the-world-at-large via this and my other blogs. It's just you and me now, dear diary, and that's okay with me. According to my latest .sig file statement, "You are the only human being you gnow.", there is nobody but me out there anyway, and so why would I pretend to write "to" another person if "they" are merely my own idea of what's out there.
In one of the last posts I sent to the group I explained my opinion of "knowledge." One of the old members of the group I was just beginning to appreciate put a kink in my new .sig file to state, "You are the only person you grow." I thought that was clever, but that it missed the point of my intent in using "gnow" instead of "grow".
This is my own quote from an exchange about this on the group, "Growing knowledge is basically an ego trip in my jaundiced opinion. Acquiring it by gnosis is tantamount to the hero's journey. Growing is evolutionary. Gnowing is devolutionary. It's abandoning one's rules of conscience to get back to the garden again."
Granted, "growing" knowledge in the first part of one's life seems to be a useful and probably necessary thing to do. In the United States there is not much of a choice because a dependent is required to go to school by law. Getting passing grades during that period is sort of necessary so that you want get passing over and have to attend school with a younger group of students can be humiliating and dangerous to everybody.
My writing that "growing knowledge is basically an ego trip", in retrospect, might have hurt the guy's feeling that substituted "grow" for "gnow", but I didn't intend to do that. That happens infrequently. In the last few months somehow managed to hurt an old friend's feelings, and he stomped out of my house never to return again. Contrarily, that might turn out to be a good thing. Occasionally, I do the right thing without knowing what I'm doing.
❦
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
The Dreams Of Being Me Get Nasty
❧
I wrote a long entry yesterday, but didn't publish it. I was not in a very good mood because of stomach problems, and my writing showed it. I'm gonna edit it now to see if I can come up with something I'm willing to publish. As a matter of fact, I just did that and I'm okay with it now.
Nothing makes me feel more gullible and stupid than my dreams. I had a strange dream about being in bed with a rather large snake that scared the hell out of me, but then I dreamed of being cuckolded by my second wife and a man who pretended to be my friend. In the dream I was sitting outside in a car and watching these men cum and go in and out of our apartment to help themselves to my ex-wife's eager unfaithfulness.
I write "themselves" because he called in a neighbor to come help himself and they all seemed real cozy making a fool out of me when they thought I wasn't around. When I woke up I knew there was a certain amount of truth to the dream. I got shed of them all a while back. The wife left me nearly thirty years ago.
In my current opinion, I probably invited all this to happen because of my incessant need for self-importance. I ignorantly figure that what I've done with my life should matter. It doesn't. The embarrassing events that keep popping up in my dotage constantly and continuously reveal my total insignificance to myself and mankind, much less my family members.
The I Ching was the last of a series of oracles I studied and mastered to the degree necessary to work my mojo on other people without realizing that is what I was doing, and consequentually, realizing my mojo was working me. In some post or the other recently I wrote about using other people as oracles instead of the Yellow Book I learned from as my goto source.
I wrote about asking other people the well-formed questions I would normally address the book itself to receive an answer, and because the questions I ask were so pointed and designed so specifically for an oracle to respond correctly to, the person I asked the question of instead of the book had to become an oracle themselves in order to answer me.
Many, if not most people, don't have a clue they have this resource available to them, and when they watch themselves become something they never suspected they could, it makes them feel real special. Why would it not? The problem is that without a person who has mastered an oracle to ask them the right question, they can't go to the oracular mode and feel brilliant. They start hanging around people like me for that reason alone.
Making people feel smarter than they actually are is not a sensible way for me to win friends and influence people. It didn't start with my study of oracles, but back when I joined the Navy and had to take a battery of tests (like all recruits do), and the testers oohed and aahed over the results of those tests. I had the second highest scores overall and the only person who scored higher was a Duke graduate with a Masters degree in chemistry.
That's when I began to suspect my father had been lying to me about his opinion that I was too dumb to walk around without his personal guidance or to make a decision about anything I did without his approval. I had joined the Navy without his approval, and it was only because he couldn't force the Navy to suspend my application that I got to get away from his influence and find my own say so in the world external to my natal family.
I got treated special in the Navy because of those grades on those initial tests. My grades were usually the highest on any ship or station I was assigned to including those test scores of the officers who decided what and how I did things in the Navy.
The problem I have with communicating is that I have the ability to make people feel smarter than they themselves figure they are. The results of that is the same as when I ask them questions to elicit their inner oracle. They like very much feeling that they get from realizing they are capable of deep thought. It's having to hang around somebody like me to continue to feel that way that makes them get ugly.
It has taken most of my life to realize these people were playing me for a chump. I was a chump. I am a chump. I will die a chump. Not just a chump, but just about anybody's chump, with bells on. All for the purpose of feeling special and that my service to these humans is important to the evolution of mankind. Eventually, I realized I was mostly doing it for myself.
The proof of the pudding is that I live alone in a rathole of a house I built by myself and will never complete. I'll die in extreme pain and my body will rot and it won't be found until there is nothing left but bones, but until then, I'll describe it all in excruciating detail or at least think I did that without realizing that all I wrote was incomprehensible jibber jabber. What a drag, man.
These nightmares have gotta be caused by the probiotics I am is taking. They sort of do as they're advertised to do, but they make me feel like shit (pun intended), and I am becoming more and more aware that feeling like this and having these weird nightmares that indicate I a bigger fool than even I thought possible.
Worse, I am is a horrible, unfeeling person as a result of imbibing these "good" bacteria. It's not that I'm as mean as a snake, I just do dumb, meaninless things that hurt people's feelings. Treating people badly is about the only way I can rid myself of the people who only abide my nasty disposition in order to feel smarter than they really are.
I have an update about the probiotics. I stopped taking the recommended , high priced ones with nine strains, and take only the acidofelous Pearls I got off the shelf at Wal-Mart. The Pearls (brand name) still cause me some discomfort, but I can tell by the gurgling that they're working as advertised. If they stop I'll go back to the multi-strained pills.
http://www.pearlslife.com/Products/All-Products.aspx?filter=dt0
I gotta be projecting about my relationship with other people. Either that or attempt to realize I'm doing it in real ti-me. That's not so easy to do. It's me that can't keep up the pretense, not them, they can't even pretend they can sustain the attitude necessary to reach for their own star. All fall down.
❦
I wrote a long entry yesterday, but didn't publish it. I was not in a very good mood because of stomach problems, and my writing showed it. I'm gonna edit it now to see if I can come up with something I'm willing to publish. As a matter of fact, I just did that and I'm okay with it now.
Nothing makes me feel more gullible and stupid than my dreams. I had a strange dream about being in bed with a rather large snake that scared the hell out of me, but then I dreamed of being cuckolded by my second wife and a man who pretended to be my friend. In the dream I was sitting outside in a car and watching these men cum and go in and out of our apartment to help themselves to my ex-wife's eager unfaithfulness.
I write "themselves" because he called in a neighbor to come help himself and they all seemed real cozy making a fool out of me when they thought I wasn't around. When I woke up I knew there was a certain amount of truth to the dream. I got shed of them all a while back. The wife left me nearly thirty years ago.
In my current opinion, I probably invited all this to happen because of my incessant need for self-importance. I ignorantly figure that what I've done with my life should matter. It doesn't. The embarrassing events that keep popping up in my dotage constantly and continuously reveal my total insignificance to myself and mankind, much less my family members.
The I Ching was the last of a series of oracles I studied and mastered to the degree necessary to work my mojo on other people without realizing that is what I was doing, and consequentually, realizing my mojo was working me. In some post or the other recently I wrote about using other people as oracles instead of the Yellow Book I learned from as my goto source.
I wrote about asking other people the well-formed questions I would normally address the book itself to receive an answer, and because the questions I ask were so pointed and designed so specifically for an oracle to respond correctly to, the person I asked the question of instead of the book had to become an oracle themselves in order to answer me.
Many, if not most people, don't have a clue they have this resource available to them, and when they watch themselves become something they never suspected they could, it makes them feel real special. Why would it not? The problem is that without a person who has mastered an oracle to ask them the right question, they can't go to the oracular mode and feel brilliant. They start hanging around people like me for that reason alone.
Making people feel smarter than they actually are is not a sensible way for me to win friends and influence people. It didn't start with my study of oracles, but back when I joined the Navy and had to take a battery of tests (like all recruits do), and the testers oohed and aahed over the results of those tests. I had the second highest scores overall and the only person who scored higher was a Duke graduate with a Masters degree in chemistry.
That's when I began to suspect my father had been lying to me about his opinion that I was too dumb to walk around without his personal guidance or to make a decision about anything I did without his approval. I had joined the Navy without his approval, and it was only because he couldn't force the Navy to suspend my application that I got to get away from his influence and find my own say so in the world external to my natal family.
I got treated special in the Navy because of those grades on those initial tests. My grades were usually the highest on any ship or station I was assigned to including those test scores of the officers who decided what and how I did things in the Navy.
The problem I have with communicating is that I have the ability to make people feel smarter than they themselves figure they are. The results of that is the same as when I ask them questions to elicit their inner oracle. They like very much feeling that they get from realizing they are capable of deep thought. It's having to hang around somebody like me to continue to feel that way that makes them get ugly.
It has taken most of my life to realize these people were playing me for a chump. I was a chump. I am a chump. I will die a chump. Not just a chump, but just about anybody's chump, with bells on. All for the purpose of feeling special and that my service to these humans is important to the evolution of mankind. Eventually, I realized I was mostly doing it for myself.
The proof of the pudding is that I live alone in a rathole of a house I built by myself and will never complete. I'll die in extreme pain and my body will rot and it won't be found until there is nothing left but bones, but until then, I'll describe it all in excruciating detail or at least think I did that without realizing that all I wrote was incomprehensible jibber jabber. What a drag, man.
These nightmares have gotta be caused by the probiotics I am is taking. They sort of do as they're advertised to do, but they make me feel like shit (pun intended), and I am becoming more and more aware that feeling like this and having these weird nightmares that indicate I a bigger fool than even I thought possible.
Worse, I am is a horrible, unfeeling person as a result of imbibing these "good" bacteria. It's not that I'm as mean as a snake, I just do dumb, meaninless things that hurt people's feelings. Treating people badly is about the only way I can rid myself of the people who only abide my nasty disposition in order to feel smarter than they really are.
I have an update about the probiotics. I stopped taking the recommended , high priced ones with nine strains, and take only the acidofelous Pearls I got off the shelf at Wal-Mart. The Pearls (brand name) still cause me some discomfort, but I can tell by the gurgling that they're working as advertised. If they stop I'll go back to the multi-strained pills.
http://www.pearlslife.com/Products/All-Products.aspx?filter=dt0
I gotta be projecting about my relationship with other people. Either that or attempt to realize I'm doing it in real ti-me. That's not so easy to do. It's me that can't keep up the pretense, not them, they can't even pretend they can sustain the attitude necessary to reach for their own star. All fall down.
❦
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Burning The Past
❧
Ten o'clock in the morning, and the temperature is a muggy 58° (14.444° C), and so humid I can see the droplets of moisture in the air, even as blind as I am is. The sun is nowhere in sight, and according to the weather report, it probably won't be until tomorrow. As long as it's fairly warm, and it is fairly warm, I can dig it.
The probiotics I've been using for a couple of days now has not been a pleasant affair. I've had stomach aches and headaches galore. I've tried to ignore them in order to reach the good end (not knowing what that might be), but still, it's aggravating and highly uncomfortable. The headaches are the same as if I'd been constipated for a few days.
When I have been able to relieve myself it's like diarrhea, but the relief is helpful when it comes to pass (pun intended). I was afraid that the diarrhea could get out of control such that I'd get dehydrated, but that has proved to be a useless worry. Maybe it was just part of the way this stuff works. In any case, I am is feeling okay now, and the headache I woke up this morning seems to be going away.
Here I'm writing about my personal life as if this were a teenagers diary. Well, it sort of is a diary or a journal, as well as being my way to contemplate my own life on a daily basis. Things pop up here that I don't usually dwell on. It's just that I am doesn't lead a very exciting life these days, at least the sort of life that makes for exciting reading.
To me, I am is doing the world a favor by not writing in it's inimitable "tossed-word salad" fashion as it has for the last decade or so. I am is getting senile enough without deliberately doing it as controversy. It's a form that allows him to explore the world in an off-hand way, but its not all that pleasant for his readers. It might be even mo' bettah if he were to stop referencing himself as "I am is" to indicate his state of being in the first person singular, but One can't have everything and eat it too.
My brother came over last night and called out to me to ask if I wanted to go for our walk. He can't call me on the phone like he has in the past because I don't have a home phone number that works anymore. My account has been eliminated. As soon as I realized they had disconnected both my home phone and my DSL connection, I threw my old touch-tone phone in the trash, and then, last night, I used the trash (including my old phone) to start a fire to burn a brush heap.
Good riddance. It was very hard to keep clean. Not that I tried to keep it clean. Sometime I'd get so embarrassed that my non-visitors would realize how seedy I am can be, and I'd spray it with rubbing alcohol and wipe it down with a paper towel to get the worst of the gunk off of it. Now, I don't have to do that anymore, perhaps the angels won't be afraid to tread here anymore.
The dreamtime apparently doesn't like the probiotics either. I had horrible nightmares the first night such that I woke up practically screaming. Well, not last night. The first dream I woke up to was about a puzzle and a guy that seemed to need juggling skills as well as intellectual insight to even attempt to solve it. It's kind of vague now.
The puzzle pieces were like intricately shaped wooden tiles, but I couldn't discern what material they were made of. He was working inside of a picture frame setup that was around two by three feet in dimension. the puzzle pieces were maybe a half-inch in depth and didn't protrude beyond each other, so that the pieces he had already put in place were a flat surface. The puzzle part was all about shapes.
He worked at a frenzied pace as if he had no choice because the puzzle pieces were being thrust at him at breakneck speed, and that's where the need for him to also be a juggler came into play. Candidly, it was a fascinating process. He wanted me to learn how to do it, so that he could stop doing it. I woke up.
The second dream I woke up to involved a beautiful young woman that I never knew all that well. She was/is a married woman, and that's all it takes for me to not get too close or let my emotions run wild. She was always friendly with me with a ready smile, but she seemed to be friendly with most people.
Her smile had the same affect on me as maybe the Mona Lisa's smile does in the Louvre museum (never been there). We had no relationship in the dream other than the fact that she kept popping into view between scenarios. I don't remember much about the content of the dream itself anymore, except that it was not a terrifying nightmare, and I was happy about that.
Writing my new .sig file came as a delightful surprise to me. It's like an 800 page book in one sentence. As a poet I've constantly attempted to reduce all my drifting thoughts into as few words as possible, but for me this one statement was a tour de force. It states everything I know about projection and where it leads to. Oneself.
I wrote an e-mail post yesterday about using other people as oracles, and more specifically how that comes to pass. It was a clumsy, ill-worded attempt that could have and will be better done, but the fact that I got the rudiments down in some fashion was pleasing to me. I haven't gotten any response to it, and don't expect to. The people I addressed with the post had rather reach for ancient dead prophets for insight, and I have to be satisfied with that.
Describing the processes that brought my grasp of insight about the cornucopia I reach for in order to ken the physical world, is not something that came to me overnight, and I have suffered dearly for it. It has cost me everything that most people hold dear over a long period of time.
To recommend that others take up that cross seems tantamount to asking them to submit to heinous torture. Most of them don't have enough time left to undertake such a journey even if they knew how to do it. No blame.
❦
Ten o'clock in the morning, and the temperature is a muggy 58° (14.444° C), and so humid I can see the droplets of moisture in the air, even as blind as I am is. The sun is nowhere in sight, and according to the weather report, it probably won't be until tomorrow. As long as it's fairly warm, and it is fairly warm, I can dig it.
The probiotics I've been using for a couple of days now has not been a pleasant affair. I've had stomach aches and headaches galore. I've tried to ignore them in order to reach the good end (not knowing what that might be), but still, it's aggravating and highly uncomfortable. The headaches are the same as if I'd been constipated for a few days.
When I have been able to relieve myself it's like diarrhea, but the relief is helpful when it comes to pass (pun intended). I was afraid that the diarrhea could get out of control such that I'd get dehydrated, but that has proved to be a useless worry. Maybe it was just part of the way this stuff works. In any case, I am is feeling okay now, and the headache I woke up this morning seems to be going away.
Here I'm writing about my personal life as if this were a teenagers diary. Well, it sort of is a diary or a journal, as well as being my way to contemplate my own life on a daily basis. Things pop up here that I don't usually dwell on. It's just that I am doesn't lead a very exciting life these days, at least the sort of life that makes for exciting reading.
To me, I am is doing the world a favor by not writing in it's inimitable "tossed-word salad" fashion as it has for the last decade or so. I am is getting senile enough without deliberately doing it as controversy. It's a form that allows him to explore the world in an off-hand way, but its not all that pleasant for his readers. It might be even mo' bettah if he were to stop referencing himself as "I am is" to indicate his state of being in the first person singular, but One can't have everything and eat it too.
My brother came over last night and called out to me to ask if I wanted to go for our walk. He can't call me on the phone like he has in the past because I don't have a home phone number that works anymore. My account has been eliminated. As soon as I realized they had disconnected both my home phone and my DSL connection, I threw my old touch-tone phone in the trash, and then, last night, I used the trash (including my old phone) to start a fire to burn a brush heap.
Good riddance. It was very hard to keep clean. Not that I tried to keep it clean. Sometime I'd get so embarrassed that my non-visitors would realize how seedy I am can be, and I'd spray it with rubbing alcohol and wipe it down with a paper towel to get the worst of the gunk off of it. Now, I don't have to do that anymore, perhaps the angels won't be afraid to tread here anymore.
The dreamtime apparently doesn't like the probiotics either. I had horrible nightmares the first night such that I woke up practically screaming. Well, not last night. The first dream I woke up to was about a puzzle and a guy that seemed to need juggling skills as well as intellectual insight to even attempt to solve it. It's kind of vague now.
The puzzle pieces were like intricately shaped wooden tiles, but I couldn't discern what material they were made of. He was working inside of a picture frame setup that was around two by three feet in dimension. the puzzle pieces were maybe a half-inch in depth and didn't protrude beyond each other, so that the pieces he had already put in place were a flat surface. The puzzle part was all about shapes.
He worked at a frenzied pace as if he had no choice because the puzzle pieces were being thrust at him at breakneck speed, and that's where the need for him to also be a juggler came into play. Candidly, it was a fascinating process. He wanted me to learn how to do it, so that he could stop doing it. I woke up.
The second dream I woke up to involved a beautiful young woman that I never knew all that well. She was/is a married woman, and that's all it takes for me to not get too close or let my emotions run wild. She was always friendly with me with a ready smile, but she seemed to be friendly with most people.
Her smile had the same affect on me as maybe the Mona Lisa's smile does in the Louvre museum (never been there). We had no relationship in the dream other than the fact that she kept popping into view between scenarios. I don't remember much about the content of the dream itself anymore, except that it was not a terrifying nightmare, and I was happy about that.
Writing my new .sig file came as a delightful surprise to me. It's like an 800 page book in one sentence. As a poet I've constantly attempted to reduce all my drifting thoughts into as few words as possible, but for me this one statement was a tour de force. It states everything I know about projection and where it leads to. Oneself.
I wrote an e-mail post yesterday about using other people as oracles, and more specifically how that comes to pass. It was a clumsy, ill-worded attempt that could have and will be better done, but the fact that I got the rudiments down in some fashion was pleasing to me. I haven't gotten any response to it, and don't expect to. The people I addressed with the post had rather reach for ancient dead prophets for insight, and I have to be satisfied with that.
Describing the processes that brought my grasp of insight about the cornucopia I reach for in order to ken the physical world, is not something that came to me overnight, and I have suffered dearly for it. It has cost me everything that most people hold dear over a long period of time.
To recommend that others take up that cross seems tantamount to asking them to submit to heinous torture. Most of them don't have enough time left to undertake such a journey even if they knew how to do it. No blame.
❦
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Individualism vs Tribalism
Another aspect of my earthly identity is now gone. The flashing lights on my DSL modem have ceased blinking. The dial-tone on my ancient touch-tone telephone is silent. I no longer have a telephone number that works, and the band plays on.
The loss of this form of identity is infinitesimal compared to the Japanese people I'm watching on TV. Lots of old people, in particular, lost everything near and dear to them. No reminders of the past to cling to in order to know who they are. Some of the ones that were interviewed lost their entire families, much less the photographs and mementos. All gone in minutes.
Normally I don't allow myself to get emotional over catastrophes, and I'm not really all that upset now. It doesn't do any good. When it's over, it's over. With tsunamis, however, the destruction seems so utterly complete. If you're on the ground and don't have time or refuse to believe the warnings quickly, you're dead. Ground up into little pieces by all that you once loved and thought protected you.
The probiotics I've been taking appear to have been the source of the complaints I've been writing about with my stomach. I kind of figured those bacteria I deliberately ingested were causing the discomfort, but it could have been something serious and life-threatening. For a couple of days I was constipated, and then on about the third day I started going to the bathroom, and didn't stop until I felt like there could be nothing left, and then I went some more.
My stomach doesn't hurt anymore. There's a whole lot of gurgling going on. Things are moving around. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. I had to get up last night to relieve my bladder many times last night because I had deliberately consumed lots of water. When I went back to bed it took a long time for me to fall back to sleep. I wanted to take one of the sleeping pills that I have left from an old prescription, but I hesitate to do that in the fear of getting addicted to the point of needing them to sleep.
Giving up my telephone number was more mentally troublesome than I expected. I sort of thought I was beyond that. As if my remembering vision was the only identity I need. My old telephone number was listed in the local directory in my "nom de plume" as felix. Quite regularly I got calls from Latinos who figured I was a Latino. They don't have the slightest respect for the Do Not Call registry, or apparently, for each other.
The other day I got a call from some white redneck who thought I was Spanish, he didn't speak Spanish, and when I told him my number was on the No Call list, he called me "Nigger!" and hung up. What a drag, man. Most everybody is prejudiced about somebody, but that's a hateful world that I've tried to confront in myself, and it's hard because a lotta people don't seem to even be trying. That doesn't bode well for the future of this country of immigrants. It's that identity thing again.
As I understand it, and I don't claim to know enough to even have a strong, irrefutable opinion, the whole rebellion in the mideast is that age-old conflict between warring tribes. In the flareup in Libya, for instance, the conflict appears to be more about Gaddafi's tribe against other regional tribes, than a country-wide referendum about freedom of speech and equality.
In Iraq alone, there are over 300 different tribes. All with their own customs and rules they seem very willing to fight to the death over, and it's been that way for thousands of years. The two different kinds of Islamic sects ought to be enough to fight over, but with three hundred different tribes (that have serious differences in their own point of view) it seems impossible that they will ever be able to form a nation-wide system that will let them live in some semblance of peace.
I was raised in the Jim Crow system in the Deep South. I tried to walk away from it and treat everybody as an equal, but there is something very deep and impenetrable that's hard to get shed of when push comes to shove. In the recent past I've had strangers walk up to me and inform me that I was one of them whether I liked it or not, so I should stop acting like a phony. I know my act is artificial at best, but I owe it to myself to keep trying to do right.
For this and other reasons I get the impression that lines are being drawn which might force the issue of having to choose one set of principles over another. I can't imagine joining forces with the conservative movements. I'm just not that afraid to try new ideas like they seem to be. I don't have to worry about it. Cowardice AND over-confidence makes humans do stupid things.
It's not always easy to find the middle way, but getting older makes it more convenient to get over. Many people appear to give way with older people because they seem so set in their ways. There is no fool like an old fool, and besides, since they will soon be dead of natural causes, it doesn't matter if they refuse to cater to the prevailing currents or not.
It is not cold outside, but it's cool and with a steady wind blowing it seems even cooler. It's the same every spring with me. I can't wait for it to get warm and stay warm, until it does. It's an old, old story. False spring. Tomorrow, the weathermen promise, it's gonna warm up to over 70 degrees, and I'm be able to lay naked on my new adjustable lawn chair.
I've been able to lay out a couple of times in the last week or so, but that chilly wind has blown for a couple of days now, and it hasn't been exactly comfortable. The ultraviolet light of the sun helps with my skin problems, besides helping me to relax and feel at ease with my psyche.
The loss of this form of identity is infinitesimal compared to the Japanese people I'm watching on TV. Lots of old people, in particular, lost everything near and dear to them. No reminders of the past to cling to in order to know who they are. Some of the ones that were interviewed lost their entire families, much less the photographs and mementos. All gone in minutes.
Normally I don't allow myself to get emotional over catastrophes, and I'm not really all that upset now. It doesn't do any good. When it's over, it's over. With tsunamis, however, the destruction seems so utterly complete. If you're on the ground and don't have time or refuse to believe the warnings quickly, you're dead. Ground up into little pieces by all that you once loved and thought protected you.
The probiotics I've been taking appear to have been the source of the complaints I've been writing about with my stomach. I kind of figured those bacteria I deliberately ingested were causing the discomfort, but it could have been something serious and life-threatening. For a couple of days I was constipated, and then on about the third day I started going to the bathroom, and didn't stop until I felt like there could be nothing left, and then I went some more.
My stomach doesn't hurt anymore. There's a whole lot of gurgling going on. Things are moving around. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. I had to get up last night to relieve my bladder many times last night because I had deliberately consumed lots of water. When I went back to bed it took a long time for me to fall back to sleep. I wanted to take one of the sleeping pills that I have left from an old prescription, but I hesitate to do that in the fear of getting addicted to the point of needing them to sleep.
Giving up my telephone number was more mentally troublesome than I expected. I sort of thought I was beyond that. As if my remembering vision was the only identity I need. My old telephone number was listed in the local directory in my "nom de plume" as felix. Quite regularly I got calls from Latinos who figured I was a Latino. They don't have the slightest respect for the Do Not Call registry, or apparently, for each other.
The other day I got a call from some white redneck who thought I was Spanish, he didn't speak Spanish, and when I told him my number was on the No Call list, he called me "Nigger!" and hung up. What a drag, man. Most everybody is prejudiced about somebody, but that's a hateful world that I've tried to confront in myself, and it's hard because a lotta people don't seem to even be trying. That doesn't bode well for the future of this country of immigrants. It's that identity thing again.
As I understand it, and I don't claim to know enough to even have a strong, irrefutable opinion, the whole rebellion in the mideast is that age-old conflict between warring tribes. In the flareup in Libya, for instance, the conflict appears to be more about Gaddafi's tribe against other regional tribes, than a country-wide referendum about freedom of speech and equality.
In Iraq alone, there are over 300 different tribes. All with their own customs and rules they seem very willing to fight to the death over, and it's been that way for thousands of years. The two different kinds of Islamic sects ought to be enough to fight over, but with three hundred different tribes (that have serious differences in their own point of view) it seems impossible that they will ever be able to form a nation-wide system that will let them live in some semblance of peace.
I was raised in the Jim Crow system in the Deep South. I tried to walk away from it and treat everybody as an equal, but there is something very deep and impenetrable that's hard to get shed of when push comes to shove. In the recent past I've had strangers walk up to me and inform me that I was one of them whether I liked it or not, so I should stop acting like a phony. I know my act is artificial at best, but I owe it to myself to keep trying to do right.
For this and other reasons I get the impression that lines are being drawn which might force the issue of having to choose one set of principles over another. I can't imagine joining forces with the conservative movements. I'm just not that afraid to try new ideas like they seem to be. I don't have to worry about it. Cowardice AND over-confidence makes humans do stupid things.
It's not always easy to find the middle way, but getting older makes it more convenient to get over. Many people appear to give way with older people because they seem so set in their ways. There is no fool like an old fool, and besides, since they will soon be dead of natural causes, it doesn't matter if they refuse to cater to the prevailing currents or not.
It is not cold outside, but it's cool and with a steady wind blowing it seems even cooler. It's the same every spring with me. I can't wait for it to get warm and stay warm, until it does. It's an old, old story. False spring. Tomorrow, the weathermen promise, it's gonna warm up to over 70 degrees, and I'm be able to lay naked on my new adjustable lawn chair.
I've been able to lay out a couple of times in the last week or so, but that chilly wind has blown for a couple of days now, and it hasn't been exactly comfortable. The ultraviolet light of the sun helps with my skin problems, besides helping me to relax and feel at ease with my psyche.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Long Distance Relatives
❧
Yesterday seems anticlimactic after realizing I had summarized my entire outlook on life with one well-formed statement. "You are the only human being you gnow." I figure that's true universally, but since I don't know anyone but my own idea of myself I have to keep the door open for others to see things differently.
It's cooler than it was when I first woke up. The weather forecast predicted it. A cool front dropped down over us and the wind changed direction from the southeast to the northwest. Not cold, but cooler. Yesterday it got up to 77° (25° C) with clear skies, and that was very comfortable. Because of the clear skies the temperature dropped quickly when the sun went down. The supper given for the visiting kinfolk was outside and I didn't stay long after eating.
Like a lot of people, I suppose, the tsunami that struck the Pacific Rim looked horrifying on TV. The newscasters talked about how Japan was probably the most prepared political entity on Earth for such an event, but I don't see how much could have helped deter the natural forces that struck the coastline.
The hurricanes that strike the southeastern United States are bad enough. Even the hurricane's worst damage is done by the surge that arrives with the eye of the storm, but it's constrained to a very specific area around the center of the storm whereas a tsunami strikes the coastal areas of any landmass it approaches. The rescue workers don't know where to begin. No blame.
It was warm enough yesterday to lay out half-naked in the sun. I was more than half-naked. I only wore my underpants in order to expose my body to the ultraviolet rays of the sun. I've read that exposure helps with the psoriasis that is part of the rheumatoid arthritis disease I suffer from. Maybe it does help. This morning the redness seems less pronounced.
The last time I shopped at Lowe's for plants I saw what looked like a well constructed sun-bathing chair that can be adjusted for different heights. Normally, it seems, these types of chairs have plastic webbing that eventually gets torn up for all kinds of reasons, but this one has metal slats that are welded into place.
It's not cheap. $100. That's a lot for what amounts to a glorified lawn chair. If I'm gonna be out there a lot to get the ultraviolet rays it will be worth it. I plan to put it out on the second-floor deck just outside this room. Nobody can see me out there in a state of dishabille unless they drive up directly to my house, but from there I see them coming and duck inside real quick.
It makes me sad that I may have to stop playing the scales on my digital piano. I've already had to give up on playing my guitar. Of course, I stopped playing my guitar several years ago in favor of the piano, but the idea that I can't play it because it's too painful is the point. As I get older there are lots of things I may not be able to do any more. It's when I can't take walks that might be worse. Currently that is not a problem.
I didn't do much walking yesterday. The supper my brother and his wife gave was unexpected, and it came up when I thought I'd get out and go. I admit to some curiosity about what this man would look like. He came from my mother's side of the family. I had only met his grandfather a couple of times over the years.
That's how it is with families that grow up in poor places like Mississippi. Everybody has to leave to make a living when they grow up. My mother and father came east to North Carolina because my father got a job offer to teach here along with other teachers with a degree in agriculture from all over the country when N.C. passed a law to have one in every high school.
His siblings got involved with the petroleum industry starting in Arkansas when my father was a little boy. His oldest brother was eighteen years older than him, and found jobs for the husbands of his sisters out there. They worked for Texaco, and eventually most of them moved to Texas to retire. I hardly knew any of them ever. Too far apart. Too little time.
My mother's brothers followed my grandfather into dirt work operating heavy machinery doing road-building. For that reason they went to New Mexico around Albuquerque. Eventually, many of them and their children returned to Mississippi. Like the boy visiting here currently. His grandfather, my uncle, returned to Hattiesburg and raised his family there. Interestingly, my mother's family, the Johnson's, will have their annual reunion here this summer.
My sisters and brothers have all been to the Johnson reunions down in Mississippi before. I've never attended one. I've avoided them to do my go-ye-therefore trip. A lot of them, as I understand it, are fundamentalist Christians, and do not approve of living like I have. I hope I don't have to sacrifice their children to appease the nature gods I also follow. That sort of thing don't seem to fly with the fundies. '-)
❦
Yesterday seems anticlimactic after realizing I had summarized my entire outlook on life with one well-formed statement. "You are the only human being you gnow." I figure that's true universally, but since I don't know anyone but my own idea of myself I have to keep the door open for others to see things differently.
It's cooler than it was when I first woke up. The weather forecast predicted it. A cool front dropped down over us and the wind changed direction from the southeast to the northwest. Not cold, but cooler. Yesterday it got up to 77° (25° C) with clear skies, and that was very comfortable. Because of the clear skies the temperature dropped quickly when the sun went down. The supper given for the visiting kinfolk was outside and I didn't stay long after eating.
Like a lot of people, I suppose, the tsunami that struck the Pacific Rim looked horrifying on TV. The newscasters talked about how Japan was probably the most prepared political entity on Earth for such an event, but I don't see how much could have helped deter the natural forces that struck the coastline.
The hurricanes that strike the southeastern United States are bad enough. Even the hurricane's worst damage is done by the surge that arrives with the eye of the storm, but it's constrained to a very specific area around the center of the storm whereas a tsunami strikes the coastal areas of any landmass it approaches. The rescue workers don't know where to begin. No blame.
It was warm enough yesterday to lay out half-naked in the sun. I was more than half-naked. I only wore my underpants in order to expose my body to the ultraviolet rays of the sun. I've read that exposure helps with the psoriasis that is part of the rheumatoid arthritis disease I suffer from. Maybe it does help. This morning the redness seems less pronounced.
The last time I shopped at Lowe's for plants I saw what looked like a well constructed sun-bathing chair that can be adjusted for different heights. Normally, it seems, these types of chairs have plastic webbing that eventually gets torn up for all kinds of reasons, but this one has metal slats that are welded into place.
It's not cheap. $100. That's a lot for what amounts to a glorified lawn chair. If I'm gonna be out there a lot to get the ultraviolet rays it will be worth it. I plan to put it out on the second-floor deck just outside this room. Nobody can see me out there in a state of dishabille unless they drive up directly to my house, but from there I see them coming and duck inside real quick.
It makes me sad that I may have to stop playing the scales on my digital piano. I've already had to give up on playing my guitar. Of course, I stopped playing my guitar several years ago in favor of the piano, but the idea that I can't play it because it's too painful is the point. As I get older there are lots of things I may not be able to do any more. It's when I can't take walks that might be worse. Currently that is not a problem.
I didn't do much walking yesterday. The supper my brother and his wife gave was unexpected, and it came up when I thought I'd get out and go. I admit to some curiosity about what this man would look like. He came from my mother's side of the family. I had only met his grandfather a couple of times over the years.
That's how it is with families that grow up in poor places like Mississippi. Everybody has to leave to make a living when they grow up. My mother and father came east to North Carolina because my father got a job offer to teach here along with other teachers with a degree in agriculture from all over the country when N.C. passed a law to have one in every high school.
His siblings got involved with the petroleum industry starting in Arkansas when my father was a little boy. His oldest brother was eighteen years older than him, and found jobs for the husbands of his sisters out there. They worked for Texaco, and eventually most of them moved to Texas to retire. I hardly knew any of them ever. Too far apart. Too little time.
My mother's brothers followed my grandfather into dirt work operating heavy machinery doing road-building. For that reason they went to New Mexico around Albuquerque. Eventually, many of them and their children returned to Mississippi. Like the boy visiting here currently. His grandfather, my uncle, returned to Hattiesburg and raised his family there. Interestingly, my mother's family, the Johnson's, will have their annual reunion here this summer.
My sisters and brothers have all been to the Johnson reunions down in Mississippi before. I've never attended one. I've avoided them to do my go-ye-therefore trip. A lot of them, as I understand it, are fundamentalist Christians, and do not approve of living like I have. I hope I don't have to sacrifice their children to appease the nature gods I also follow. That sort of thing don't seem to fly with the fundies. '-)
❦
Sunday, March 13, 2011
You Are The Only Human Being You Know
❧
This morning, quite accidentally, I wrote a statement that encompasses everything I've been trying to say for years. It's my new .sig file. "You are the only human being you gnow."
I like .sig files. They draw a some criticism that I ignore, but I am is nothing if not redundant. I repeat something that impresses me over and over again until I "get it". It becomes a part of me and I am that. Granted, such silly dramatic statements are not going to make me immortal, but it makes my life interesting, and I like doing it.
A second cousin and his wife and child came here from Mississippi to get a restored title for a car that had been in a wreck. I only knew his grandfather briefly. He is staying in my brother's guest house until he gets the legal stuff done, and then he will return to Mississippi where he lives in Hattieburg.
My brother and his wife had a supper for them and invited me and our other brother and my older sister to come eat and meet the kinfolk. My oldest sister didn't come. She and her husband are older now. She's 80 years old. Maybe that's why they didn't come. Nobody cares much. She's such a drama queen and a fundamentalist Christian. She can make things very unpleasant. As if we don't know where she came from.
My second cousin has through-hiked the Appalachian Trail. When he found out I had hiked a couple of hundred miles of it we had something in common to talk about. He looks like his grandfather, my mother's baby brother. Especially his hair. Black, very thick, and it looks like a shoe brush laying on it's back. He said he let it grow out when he walked the AT and it got curly like an Afro. Nice kid.
My older sister, she's two years older than me, talked about a DNA test one of our family took. My sister has done genealogical research for a couple of decades now. The DNA test revealed a genetic line that provided information she had never had available before about our father's side of the family. The information goes back five hundred years more than she knew about. She hasn't had a chance to work out the details, and promises to tell the rest of us when she does. Naturally, there was a bastard involved.
I left right after we ate. I've been having some trouble with my stomach and my digestion tract. I'm going to bed early and see if sleep will help. It hasn't so far, but maybe that will change.
❦
This morning, quite accidentally, I wrote a statement that encompasses everything I've been trying to say for years. It's my new .sig file. "You are the only human being you gnow."
I like .sig files. They draw a some criticism that I ignore, but I am is nothing if not redundant. I repeat something that impresses me over and over again until I "get it". It becomes a part of me and I am that. Granted, such silly dramatic statements are not going to make me immortal, but it makes my life interesting, and I like doing it.
A second cousin and his wife and child came here from Mississippi to get a restored title for a car that had been in a wreck. I only knew his grandfather briefly. He is staying in my brother's guest house until he gets the legal stuff done, and then he will return to Mississippi where he lives in Hattieburg.
My brother and his wife had a supper for them and invited me and our other brother and my older sister to come eat and meet the kinfolk. My oldest sister didn't come. She and her husband are older now. She's 80 years old. Maybe that's why they didn't come. Nobody cares much. She's such a drama queen and a fundamentalist Christian. She can make things very unpleasant. As if we don't know where she came from.
My second cousin has through-hiked the Appalachian Trail. When he found out I had hiked a couple of hundred miles of it we had something in common to talk about. He looks like his grandfather, my mother's baby brother. Especially his hair. Black, very thick, and it looks like a shoe brush laying on it's back. He said he let it grow out when he walked the AT and it got curly like an Afro. Nice kid.
My older sister, she's two years older than me, talked about a DNA test one of our family took. My sister has done genealogical research for a couple of decades now. The DNA test revealed a genetic line that provided information she had never had available before about our father's side of the family. The information goes back five hundred years more than she knew about. She hasn't had a chance to work out the details, and promises to tell the rest of us when she does. Naturally, there was a bastard involved.
I left right after we ate. I've been having some trouble with my stomach and my digestion tract. I'm going to bed early and see if sleep will help. It hasn't so far, but maybe that will change.
❦
Saturday, March 12, 2011
The ACC Tournament Followed The Script
❧
The Apple Trackpad I bought has taken some time to learn to use. It's still more trouble than it's worth to use it to play MineSweeper. I'm still working on making it easy to play MineSweeper, but my whole point when playing that game is to beat my own fastest time. For that I use my Logitech Everywhere laser mouse. About every other need is now done on the Trackpad.
The trackpad is easier on my hands. The rheumatoid arthritis is taking its toll on my hands more than any other body part. A lot of the pain I experience there is my own damn fault. Yesterday when I was playing the scales on my digital piano I got really excited about how well it was going and banged my fingers against the keyboard to indicate my joy. I paid for it before I went to bed, and then all night long. Every bone in my hands ached actively even without moving them. The end is near.
Maybe it's not so odd that I chose the Spanish term "manos" for the middle nayme of my pseudonym. At the time it had more to do with my learning to read palms for a living. I never made much of a living reading palms. Back then, just getting some food to eat and an inside place to be outta the elements when the weather acted up was all I asked. Reading palms helped with that a lot.
Late this afternoon I walked back down to the intersection of ditches where I played around with a stick cutting a new passageway for the water that was dammed up with the dead leaves from last fall. I guess I wasn't surprised that the channel I dug was still open. I had thought that it would be wider or deeper, but it was about the same depth and width as when I left it. At least it hadn't clogged up again.
An hour or so ago I did a very stupid thing. Instead of spraying the silver colloids I made up into my nostrils, I picked up the wrong spray bottle and introduced 90% denatured alcohol up my right nare. It did not take forever for me to realize what I'd done and blow my nose like crazy. The mucous membranes in the nose and sinuses absorb whatever is introduced very swiftly. The medicos give vaccinations nasally because of this. I hope I didn't get enough in there to do any serious harm, but if I did, "Goodbye cruel world." '-)
❧
The Apple Trackpad I bought has taken some time to learn to use. It's still more trouble than it's worth to use it to play MineSweeper. I'm still working on making it easy to play MineSweeper, but my whole point when playing that game is to beat my own fastest time. For that I use my Logitech Everywhere laser mouse. About every other need is now done on the Trackpad.
The trackpad is easier on my hands. The rheumatoid arthritis is taking its toll on my hands more than any other body part. A lot of the pain I experience there is my own damn fault. Yesterday when I was playing the scales on my digital piano I got really excited about how well it was going and banged my fingers against the keyboard to indicate my joy. I paid for it before I went to bed, and then all night long. Every bone in my hands ached actively even without moving them. The end is near.
Maybe it's not so odd that I chose the Spanish term "manos" for the middle nayme of my pseudonym. At the time it had more to do with my learning to read palms for a living. I never made much of a living reading palms. Back then, just getting some food to eat and an inside place to be outta the elements when the weather acted up was all I asked. Reading palms helped with that a lot.
Late this afternoon I walked back down to the intersection of ditches where I played around with a stick cutting a new passageway for the water that was dammed up with the dead leaves from last fall. I guess I wasn't surprised that the channel I dug was still open. I had thought that it would be wider or deeper, but it was about the same depth and width as when I left it. At least it hadn't clogged up again.
An hour or so ago I did a very stupid thing. Instead of spraying the silver colloids I made up into my nostrils, I picked up the wrong spray bottle and introduced 90% denatured alcohol up my right nare. It did not take forever for me to realize what I'd done and blow my nose like crazy. The mucous membranes in the nose and sinuses absorb whatever is introduced very swiftly. The medicos give vaccinations nasally because of this. I hope I didn't get enough in there to do any serious harm, but if I did, "Goodbye cruel world." '-)
❧
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